Getting to Zero, by Elephant or F-18

For a group of CEOs and other business leaders gathered on World Environment Day, the view from the 44th floor of the tallest building in the Benelux region was dizzying. And as our meeting got underway high above the port city of Rotterdam, I compounded the disorientation by bringing an elephant into the room—and then an F-18.

Both, of course, were metaphors. They were images that seemed particularly apt to me as we convened for the first Zeronauts Symposium. A launch event for my new book, this gathering was designed to celebrate a new breed of innovators pushing towards net-zero-impact on various dimensions such as zero carbon, zero waste, zero toxics—even zero poverty and zero pandemics. (If this sounds familiar, it may be that you read UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’sNew York Times op-ed. After reminding his readers of the triple bottom line concept I introduced back in 1994, he pondered the possibility of aiming for “zero hunger,” “zero stunting of children,” and “zero food waste.”) The aim is to ensure that all future products become part of a circular economy in which, drawing from the emerging discipline of biomimicry, all raw materials are recovered either as biological or technological nutrients to be fed back into the industrial process.

For this crowd, the elephant in the room wasn’t the unsustainability of resource-intensive forms of capitalism that so many CEOs and other business leaders choose to ignore. People at this event acknowledged that elephant long ago. For example, one of the CEOs present, Stef Kranendijk of carpet-makers Desso, told us that when his organization adopted the cradle-to-cradle methodology developed by Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart of MBDC they discovered a typical carpet product could contain 700 ingredients, and many of them present serious sustainability challenges.

Rather, I was projecting the famous image of five or six blind men each grasping a different part of a pachyderm’s anatomy and declaring what it was. You know the story: the trunk felt to be a snake, a leg a tree trunk, tusks spears, the tail a rope. My point was that many people are addressing the problems of unsustainability from different angles, but our lack of a shared, complete perspective is hindering our ability to make progress together.

Research findings presented by Ralph Thurm of Deloitte Innovation (previously head of sustainability at Siemens) highlighted this problem. His team’s study of 64 member companies of the Global Compact showed that, even within sectors, companies have not converged on standard ways to report data on matters like carbon. This makes it almost impossible to benchmark their performance.

And then there’s the language itself. Some experts talk of a post-carbon economy, others of a circular economy, or cradle-to-cradle design, or biomimicry, or net-zero-footprint facilities. I wish that we could, as a group, lay out a comprehensive vision as clearly as Jeremy Rifkin does in The Third Industrial Revolution. This was my airplane reading as I travelled to Amsterdam the day before the summit. In it, Rifkin shows how “smart grid” connectivity in combination with household-level renewable energy production can usher in a future free of fossil fuels. (The Rotterdam event underscored how right he is in claiming that Europe is more focused on such innovation—let’s hope that as the Eurozone crisis continues, its third industrial revolution doesn’t stall.)

I think the most important thing we can do to bring the whole elephant of sustainability work into focus is to constantly remind ourselves that the word implies an orientation toward the future. Corporate citizenship can take many forms, but not all of them address future generations’ challenges in energy security, food security, water security, and climate security. This is why my colleagues and I created the Future Quotient as a scoring system to celebrate and encourage firms whose efforts promise the most long-term positive impact.

When the participants had had time to digest the elephant, I threw an F-18 fighter at them, with a dramatic image of one of the jets breaking the sound barrier, its fuselage wreathed in a cone of vapor. My point here was to remind people that, as recently as the 1940s, many people thought that the sound barrier was unbreakable. Planes that approached the speed of sound experienced severe buffeting that cut their acceleration. While it was theorized that, at supersonic speed, the flying could become smooth again, no pilot had experienced that yet. That changed, of course, when Chuck Yeager and others broke through, and proceeded to fly at ever-higher Mach numbers.

We are now banging up against a sustainability barrier, with many businesses having accelerated their efforts relatively easily and now hitting what feel like practical limits. Many leaders are unable to conceive of the new economic and business models that will allow them to break through and pick up speed again in achieving ever more audacious goals. But just as the ingenuity of the aerospace industry managed to break through the sound barrier, I am optimistic that inspired businesses can break through the sustainability barrier.

A phrase that rings on in my mind from Rotterdam came from Thomas Rau, the leading German eco-architect based in Amsterdam, who said that he is not interested to work on the old mistakes, but instead wants to “work on the new mistakes.” An aerospace engineer would call this pushing the envelope. With enough experimentation at the very edges of the possible, we will find ways to do the apparently impossible.